Tacoma Art Museum is nearly doubling its gallery space in order to make permanent room for the 280-work Western art collection of German-born billionaires Erivan and Helga Haub. The museum will get an entirely new, 10,000-square-foot wing devoted to Westernness.

This could be fun. A place where commie-queers and stodgy old cigar-puffers collide. Where there are hippies and industrialists and Salish artists working in the old ways and urban aborigines, aesthetes, conceptualists, pop artists. We'll see.

It's unlike anything else in the region, that's for sure. And yes, it is a little weird. Psychogeographically, Northwest museums tend to situate themselves in the Art World (NY/global) or within a very localized/historical scope. In the last few years, a greater awareness has been paid to the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver corridor. But not much is made of the American West as an identity—which might invite connections to places as far away, miles-wise and minds-wise, as Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego, Santa Fe. Will those connections be interesting? It depends entirely on how they're done.

The announcement also continues TAM's recent history of presenting itself as in alignment with the historical underdog, as if dramatizing the Seattle-Tacoma relationship itself. The category of Western art—it brings to mind bronze statues of animals and gauzy cowboy-and-Indian paintings—is to mainstream art what hot dogs are to steak. This kind of dynamic can be fun to play with; again, the proof comes later.

I don't know exactly what's in the collection; artists include Bierstadt, Moran, Remington, Russell, O'Keeffe, and lesser-knowns like E. Martin Hennings and Ernest Blumenschein. The museum sent a handful of images, and they are peculiar and varied (more on the jump), the paintings dating back to the 1820s and forward into the present. Contemporary artists include John Clymer, Tom Lovell, Bill Schenck, and Clyde Aspevig. Erivan Haub, now retired, was born into a family that owned a major chain of German food retailers; he later acquired a nearly-half interest in the American chain A&P, and he has land in Washington, Wyoming, and owns the ski resort Sun Mountain Lodge in Winthrop.

How will a Western wing situated in a Northwestern museum that has at the other end of its building a double-height gallery built to accommodate large-scale contemporary art compare to, say, the Autry National Center in LA (formed in 2004, and governed by four initiatives, when the Southwest Museum, the Museum of the American West, and the Women of the West Museum came together)?

How would a Mona-Lisa-like portrait of a decorated chief read differently if it were sharing a building with, say, Hide/Seek, the queer show that traveled to TAM from D.C. this spring? How might scenes of European/tribal contact resonate with the AIDS exhibition TAM curator Rock Hushka has been organizing? How do artists today construct/ignore/play on/resist/deny Westernness?

Antoine Predock designed Tacoma Art Museum, but Olson Kundig was the local architect of record. Now, Predock will not be involved in the expansion, which will be handled by Tom Kundig, in his first completed museum project. (We've already looked at what will happen to TAM's front door, and the freighted-golden history of the museum front door.)

The wing will stretch southward down Pacific Avenue toward Union Station, resting on stilts on the hillside like the existing building. A staircase—one already being called "grand," comparable to the Chihuly Bridge of Glass in its value as its own art experience, in a great comprehensive overview piece by The News Tribune's Craig Sailor—will lead upward from the parking lot into a re-created lobby. The new museum, with a price tag of $15 million, paid for mostly by the Haubs although the museum isn't revealing how much they're giving exactly, is expected to open in 2014.